2010 World Cup: a Twitter timeline
[image created by @miguelrios]
During the 2010 World Cup, the world watched together -- and they shared their experiences in a real-time, global conversation on the Internet.
To illustrate that point, here are statistics and infographics that illustrate the global nature of the games and how fans’ interest & enthusiasm built over the course of the tournament on Twitter.
- The World Cup final represented the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter’s history.
- Throughout the match, Tweets-per-second (TPS) were much higher than average; during the game’s final 15 minutes, this jumped to more than 2,000 TPS. (Spain’s winning goal in the final scored a 3,051 TPS.)
- During the final, people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages.
- At the moment of the winning goal, people from 81 countries tweeted in 23 different languages. This moment is represented on this Wordle infographic.
To highlight how much Twitter has been pulsing with World Cup activity over the past month, our analytics and relevance teams put together the infographic above, charting fans’ use of hashflags (like #esp or #usa) during the tournament with a background of TPS over the same period.
- When you look at this graphic, think of it like a soundwave -- the louder and more consistent the “sound,” the bigger the impact in all directions.
- Countries’ flags represent use of their hashflag. The size of the flag “waves” fluctuate with the frequency & consistency of tweets containing each country’s hashflag.
